State Fund plays a truly unique role in California. By always focusing on our purpose—to provide fairly priced workers' compensation insurance, to help make workplaces safe, and to restore injured workers—we help drive the fifth-largest economy in the world. We are fundamentally different than other carriers because we offer coverage to all businesses in California, supporting our state's entrepreneurial spirit and stabilizing the workers' compensation marketplace.
It is our unique role—our unique responsibility, in fact—that drives us to continue to evolve and improve and to deliver as much value as we can to our customers.
In 2019, we plan to further streamline our operations, deliver new technology, and empower our employees to find creative solutions to short and long-term challenges. In a word, we will be innovative.
Here are just a few of the developments we're looking forward to this year:
New Innovation Design Center
The creation of our Innovation Design Center will drive State Fund toward a more tech-agile business environment. A small team of dedicated staff will focus on improving customer experiences, finding better service solutions, and creating an innovation pipeline for the organization.
Enhanced Online Services
We are rolling out several improvements to our policy administration technology this year. We'll soon roll out the first of these enhancements—an easier quoting process and the ability to bind coverage electronically for new business. The new technology platform these enhancements are built upon will also allow us to increase the speed of improvements over time. These include coming changes to our billing experience, payment options, and policy servicing tools.
Updated Safety and Health Services Strategy and Website
Early this year we launched SafeAtWorkCA.com—a new website designed to help businesses protect their employees and build cultures of safety in their organizations. It will bring together all kinds of practical, usable safety information, including best practices, tailgate topics, updates on regulatory and legislative changes, and much more.
Over the next three years, we will also expand our safety services investment to maximize our ability to improve workplace safety in California, reduce injuries, and bring down costs for employers.
Customer Experience Improvements
We continue to look closely at the ways our customers interact with us from our customer's point of view to address pain points and make it easier to do business with us. We're working to improve the responsiveness of our policy servicing to make it easier for brokers and policyholders to access policy information and make changes. We are making improvements to our Premium Audit processes that make audits easier to schedule and prepare for. And we have implemented a new claims process in which our representatives specialize in specific types of claims, allowing us to significantly reduce our claims backlog while improving claims quality at the same time. Those are just a few examples of areas where this customer-focused approach is driving positive changes that are being recognized by our policyholders, brokers, and injured workers.
Financial Highlights
While we are focused on innovating and delivering better services to our customers, we never lose sight of our responsibility to maintain our financial strength so we can continue to fulfill our unique role in good times as well as bad. In 2018, we maintained our financial strength and we continue to be well positioned for the future.
Here are the 2018 financial highlights that are described in detail in this report:
Thank you for joining us in our efforts to keep California working. We appreciate your continued confidence in State Fund.
Sincerely,
Vern Steiner
President & CEO